I'm shopping for a new developer machine for which I'll be using Fedora
as the development platform. Its been about about 7-8 years since I
built a machine from scratch but since then I've accumulated a lot of
parts that ultimately could contribute to a nice box if I had the right
motherboard.

I think the cost and performance/$ have to be balanced to fit you goals and
budget. At the moment I think the i7 Intel series, like the 920, is a good way
to go. I've been running ASUS for years, and while I've occasionally had a BIOS
issue on new boards, I've done that with SuperMicro as well. Some people will
have problems with some brands, but I'm comfortable suggesting ASUS. A vendor
such as Newegg will put you in a nice machine for about $800 for CPU, M/B, and
12GB RAM. That's my goal for my next system, four cores, eight threads, two
previous host machines based on those vendors, I can't justify the dual Xeon.

For real low $ operation, the old Q6600 is a good CPU, a big step up from what
you have, or TigerDirect has AMD dual core and ASUS on sale for $200 this
weekend (still need memory).

I'm partial to AMD chips. I'm not a gamer but I do like nice visuals
and decent sound. I've got a good video and sound card now but they are
both 7-8 years old. I suspect things have changed a lot and almost
wonder if newer motherboards don't offer better on board now. I plan on
taking advantage of virtualization so I imagine memory and processing
speed would be indicated. Over the long run I always seem to run out of
PCI slots or USB ports so that would be a premium. Economy is also a
bonus. I don't mind paying for performance and extensibility but if I
could get something pretty decent at a low cost maybe I could buy a
couple and replace another older board I have running. I also like
BIOS's that are tweak friendly.

Right now the fastest machine in my fleet is an Intel Pentium M 1.4 GHz
running on a dell laptop. My desktop (development) is running an old
AMD Thunderbird which I don't even think breaks 1GHz and has only .5Gb
of onboard memory.

Sorry for off topic, just thought this might be the best place to get an
idea of what everybody else is using since we all share interest in the
same development platform. Flame me directly, spare the list :)

I think the Intel i7 is the better choice, but it would be hard to go really
wrong either way.

--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen tmr com>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot